Man, your biases are showing. We ALL know you hate Hillary. That's been clear for months. But it is NOT a major (or minor) faux paux for Biden to acknowledge her. You're reading tons more into this than it deserves.

Rapture-based end-times theology includes the belief/expectation that the United State's is NOT a dominant world power at the end times. Rather, the United States will be a diminished and minor state player before the anti-Christ appears on earth. Clearly, Bush has done an excellent job in his end-time role of diminishing the United States. I wonder what Palin's end-time role might be.

What I find interesting watching someone like Palin is how there's this rah-rah, go-USA cheer leading coming from someone who believes in end-times theology and, by extension, that working toward the 2nd coming of Christ demands turning the U.S. into a 2nd world country. It's an odd conflict of interest.

Ah... actually she was. Sports and news caster. Politician.

McCain is "all-in" a Texas hold-em round with a hand that'd be great if the game were lo-ball and he hadn't misplaced a couple of his cards.

Could he have had a worse week?

Decades of his deregulation efforts in the Senate are culminating at the precipice of a financial meltdown. After launching dishonest and dishonorable attack ads claiming Barack is being advised by an officer of Freddie (or Fannie), it's revealed (this week) that his campaign manager was on Freddie's (or Fannie's) payroll within the past few weeks. His VP candidate has been stealing the spotlight all week from a bumbling Biden by uttering the kind of uninformed nonsense you'd normally expect to hear among a bunch of drunks at the local bar.

If your goal is to manage the news cycle and the best you can hope for is a small delay, he's been masterful at changing the conversation. As bad as the conversation is for McCain, it's only a fraction of how bad it was going to be (and may yet become).

If (when) I shoot my own feet, I hope the McCain team is around to handle the treatment.

If you're going to watch the stock market, you're jumping on an irrational roller coaster. In the very best of financial times, the stock market over the short term is a nervous Nelly flitting between terror and greed. If it were human, it would either be committed to a mental health facility or, at least, heavily medicated for severe bipolar disorder.

Given today's circumstances, nobody should be surprised that the stock market is going through a nervous breakdown. Hopefully, those of us in the market (like me) have bought good stocks and can take Warren Buffett's advice to ignore the financial media for the next 5 years (though, I admit, it's hard not to peek).

So, ignoring the stock market, what's happening with the TED spread? I thought I saw something that said it was down around 2%. Wouldn't that be better news to focus on?

Given the tone and conclusions of the experts quoted in this article, a president with the balls not to worry about their "legacy" really is above all the laws of the land. Bush had it right all along.

That's about as succinct a summary of Bush's entire life as I'll ever see short of a Cheney-like vulgarity.

If you understood anything about the material you were presenting, you'd recognize that it is those who are in retirement now and those approaching retirement who are in the most precarious financial spot. You're delusional if you think pensions have been a norm for the last 20 years. Even for those with pensions, they're hardly guaranteed safe.

That means that a lot of hard working and hard saving households who didn't go on a drunken sailor's buying spree over the last 10 years now face approaching retirement with only their accumulated 401Ks and IRAs. Those accounts have taken a huge hit and it is very questionable whether they will recover during the next 10 years. Hell, I'll be pleased if they recover within the next 15 to 20 years though, I fear, high- to hyper-inflation will counter any recovery.

So, while whiny putzes in their 20s and 30s are uniquely able to buy low now, the 50+ year olds are being pushed closer and closer to selling low.

Then it would obviously follow that you haven't been paying much attention when she's had occasion to speak. That's too bad because she does have an amazing talent for stringing together broken sentences into run-on paragraphs conveying absolutely nothing.

We'll have to wait and see if the Democrats develop any spine now that a Democrat is in the White House. I'm afraid the majority leadership in Congress will give us plenty of opportunities to spit in just the next month or two.

I like menudo.

Skip the IM stuff. If I want twitter, I know where to get it.

Aaaah... yeah. Presumably, that school exists because of its ethos. So long as that ethos is legal, why shouldn't they be able to use to discriminate? It's a PRIVATE school.

Consider also that stripping the school of that discriminatory response also strips those two students of an obvious way to extricate themselves from that school.

Daschle will go back to lobbying and making millions. Serves him right!

Unfortunately, I don't believe they're so isolated. Obama won because of 1) Bush and 2) the economy. Without those two millstones around their necks, the Republicans would have done much better and I doubt Obama would have won. That the republicans didn't do better in 2008 doesn't preclude their doing better in 2010; there's been no underlying shift of public sentiment.

The Republicans will always pick up the evangelicals who, after all, are litmus test voters: where do you stand on gays and abortion? That's a hell of a way to pick a political leader but there you go. That's a pretty good sized voter block to have in your pocket out of the starting gate of any campaign cycle.